Finding the unexpected in the everyday.
To help commemorate this year’s Work Zone Safety Awareness Week, here is something about one of the more readily identifiable features of many of those road construction areas across the country: the humble but important traffic cone. Many people trace the origins of the traffic cone to 1914, which also happens to be the year... Continue Reading →
April 15, 1997 A groundbreaking ceremony was held to launch the reconstruction of Interstate 15 (I-15) in the vicinity of Salt Lake City. This project, which involved renovating 16.2 miles (26.1 kilometers) of I-15 between 600 North Street in Salt Lake City and 10600 South Street in the city of Sandy, became first major Interstate... Continue Reading →
April 13, 1846 The Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) received its charter. The first president of this railroad was Samuel Vaughan Merrick, who had been born in Maine in 1801. He moved to Pennsylvania as a teenager, settling in Philadelphia. Merrick subsequently acquired a strong knowledge of engineering, and in 1824 he helped establish what was then... Continue Reading →
April 8, 2005 In north-central New Jersey, a major phase of the construction project for the new Victory Bridge was completed. This phase involved installing segments of the superstructure (the part of a bridge supporting the deck and linking one substructure to another) on the northbound section of the bridge. This bridge was built as... Continue Reading →
April 7, 1911 An early experiment in long-distance truck delivery took place between New York City and Philadelphia. A British-made Commer truck was used for the Friday morning delivery by New York City’s automotive firm Wyckoff, Church & Partridge (WCP), which owned the U.S. rights for promoting and selling those heavy-duty vehicles. As the New York... Continue Reading →
April 1, 1913 A legislative measure creating the first highway agency in Arkansas officially went into effect. This measure had been signed into law only the day before by Acting Governor Junius Marion Futrell. (As president of the Arkansas Senate, Futrell was acting governor because of Joseph Taylor Robinson’s resignation from that office so that... Continue Reading →
March 31, 1791 U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton contracted with architect John McComb Jr. to design the first version of Cape Henry Lighthouse on Virginia’s Atlantic shore and at the southern boundary of the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay. (At the time, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Lighthouse Establishment was responsible for all lighthouses in the United... Continue Reading →
March 18, 1940 With the first day of spring only a couple of days away, the California Division of Highways (part of the present-day California Department of Transportation) announced that a section of U.S. Route 50 (US 50) in the Golden State that had been blocked by snow was again available for traffic. This section... Continue Reading →
March 11, 1937 The Indiana state legislature passed a measure authorizing the Indiana State Highway Commission to work with Purdue University on methods to further improve and better maintain highways throughout the Hoosier State. (The Indiana State Highway Commission, which was established in 1917, remained in existence until being replaced by the Indiana Department of... Continue Reading →
March 9, 1985 James Evans, an engineer with the Texas Department of Transportation, spearheaded the effort to keep the roadways around his Tyler, Texas community clean of litter. He'd noticed trash flying out of the back of a pickup truck and decided to take action. Initially, he approached civic and community groups to volunteer to... Continue Reading →
Transportation History 